1956’s twin crises drove postcolonials to deconstruct Marxism’s Eurocentrism.

Evidence

Having rapidly involved himself with left-wing politics while at Oxford, becoming a key figure in the emergence of what became known as the “New Left,” he also (as he put it) found himself “dragged into Marxism backwards”—simultaneously opposed to the Soviet tanks in Budapest and to the Anglo-French paratroopers dispatched to the Suez Canal. In the crucial (and for Stuart, politically formative) moment of 1956, when those crises in Hungary and Egypt shook the foundations of both of the Cold War empires, he and his fellow “postcolonials” found it necessary (rather in the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement of the time) to begin deconstructing the Eurocentric prejudices of the very Marxism to which they had initially been attracted. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 14

Categorization

• XREF: The 1956 moment — Budapest plus Suez — as the founding break that leads Hall toward deconstructing Eurocentrism; directly anticipates later Islamophobia-field arguments about Eurocentric analytic categories. — connects to: Comecon socialisms entered a double crisis in the 1960s hidden by Third World revolutions — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 119